Picture this: You’re a project manager who is currently managing a high-priority client project and things start to unravel:
- Your senior resource, scheduled to start a critical deliverable, is pulled into another project.
- A team member you had assigned to a task is overloaded.
- You overlook the planned leave of a critical resource and schedule them to task during their absence.
In such situations, managers are compelled to make ad-hoc resource allocation changes to keep the project on track. However, managing these last-minute schedule changes becomes a challenge if you do not have real-time insights into resource availability. This is where a resource calendar becomes indispensable.
A resource calendar enhances a manager’s ability to forecast, identify, and allocate the right resources to projects at the appropriate time and cost. This helps maintain balanced workloads, optimize team efficiency, and drive successful, on-time project delivery.
Read this comprehensive blog to explore everything about the resource calendar, from its definition, benefits, to key steps for creating one from scratch.
Let’s dive in.
What is a Resource Calendar?
A resource calendar is a tool that provides real-time insights into the workforce’s availability over a specific period. It helps centralize resource-centric details like working hours, planned leaves, public holidays, working days or hours, non-working days, etc.
Accordingly, businesses can assign the right employees to the right projects at the right time. This helps reduce resourcing costs, improve productivity, and ensure successful project completion.
Now that we understand what a resource calendar is, let’s explore its key goals.
The Purpose of a Resource Calendar
A resource calendar provides managers with a bird’s eye view of team and individual availability, enabling them to plan and manage the workforce effectively. This comprehensive visibility ensures that the right team members are available when needed, preventing delays and disruptions.
Additionally, it offers real-time insights into resource utilization, helping managers balance workloads and maintain team productivity. In some cases, the calendar may highlight resource constraints such as shortages, scheduling conflicts, or overutilization, which could impact project feasibility.
By identifying these challenges early, managers can take proactive measures such as adjusting task schedules, reallocating resources, refining project scope, or modifying budgets, etc., to optimize planning and improve operational success.
Before we go ahead and share a step-by-step guide to creating a resource calendar, let’s explore the various components included in it.
What to Include in a Resource Calendar?
Here’s a breakdown of key elements included in a resource calendar, essential for identifying and deploying suitable talent throughout the project lifecycle:
Employee Name and Role
A resource calendar should include employee names to help manage teams or track performance. While roles help define each resource’s responsibilities and highlight their contribution to the team’s or organization’s goals.
Core Skills and Competencies
Capturing each team member’s skills, certifications, and expertise enables effective resource allocation. It also helps identify skill gaps, allowing managers to provide targeted training opportunities to enhance efficiency and productivity.
SAVIOM’s Competency Matrix provides managers with insights into each resource’s skills, expertise, experience, etc., to identify skill gaps.
Resource Availability
Resource availability refers to the number and type of employees that are currently available to take on new tasks or projects. This insight helps avoid last-minute scheduling conflicts and ensures efficient workload distribution.
Holiday Schedule
Factoring in public holidays, PTO, company-wide breaks, etc., is crucial for accurate resource planning. A resource calendar helps managers anticipate workforce unavailability and adjust allocations to ensure seamless project execution.
Project Schedule
The project schedule outlines key milestones, deadlines, required resources, task durations, etc. It helps managers align workforce availability with the project phases, ensuring timely initiation and progress.
Read More: What is Project Scheduling: Examples, Benefits, and Best Practices
Tools and Software Required
To ensure efficient workforce planning, a resource calendar should specify the essential software and tools for task execution. Among other things, it should help track, identify, and assign employees to keep projects on schedule.
Now that we’ve covered the components of a resource calendar let’s explore how it differs from a project calendar.
Resource Calendar vs. Project Calendar
As cited above, a resource calendar tracks the availability of human and non-human resources over a specific period. On the contrary, a project calendar outlines the working and non-working days, key milestones, deadlines, task schedules, etc. It provides a structured timeline to help managers coordinate activities, allocate resources efficiently, and ensure timely project completion.
However, since both calendars play a fundamental role in managing the different aspects of the project lifecycle, they can often be mistaken for one another. So, before we move ahead, here’s a table to understand the key differences:
| Feature | Resource Calendar | Project Calendar |
|---|---|---|
| Created By | Resource manager during the project planning phase | Project manager during the project planning phase |
| Definition | Help track the availability of human and non-human resources | It defines the working and non-working days for the project |
| Focus | Focuses on individual/team availability and constraints | Focuses on project milestones, deadlines, and work schedules |
| Key Components | Working hours, holidays, task schedule, planned leaves, resource allocations | Work shifts, project’s start/end date, planned tasks, and dependencies |
| Purpose | Ensures resources are available when needed for a project | Tracks the project progress and identifies potential bottlenecks beforehand |
| Impact on Project | Helps in effectively deploying the right resources to the right tasks | Helps plan project phases to ensure timely initiation and delivery |
Now that we’ve distinguished between the two let’s explore the key benefits of a resource calendar in the following section.
Benefits of Using a Resource Calendar
A resource calendar is key to efficient workforce scheduling and successful project completion. Read on to learn more:
Forward Plan Resource Requirements Well in Advance
Once the resource manager receives the requirements from the project manager, they can leverage the calendar to view the current and future schedule of the talent pool. This foresight gives them enough lead time to secure the necessary resources for timely project initiation and seamless execution ahead of the curve.
Gain Comprehensive Visibility into Resource Availability
With a resource calendar, managers can gain comprehensive real-time visibility into staff availability, such as ongoing and pipeline task allocations, vacation time, national holidays, etc. This insight allows them to assign work based on resource availability and ensure everyone is productive.
Read More: What is Resource Availability in Project Management, and Why Does It Matter?
Helps Deploy the Right Resources to Tasks
By providing critical insights into each employee’s skills, availability, and workload, a resource calendar enables managers to schedule best-fit talent for various tasks. This alignment leads to competent resource allocation and enhanced employee performance.
SAVIOM’s Resource Schedule Chart offers managers a comprehensive view of resource allocations.
Bridges the Capacity vs. Demand Gaps Proactively
A robust resource calendar enables managers to view current and future project bookings. As a result, it allows them to gauge current resource capacity against future project demands and determine if there is a shortage or excess of staff. Accordingly, they can take corrective measures such as selling excess capacity, conducting retraining/upskilling programs, or engaging in planned hiring to bridge the gap.
Read More: How to Measure Resource Capacity and Demand?
Enables Resource Sharing Across Multiple Projects
A resource calendar provides visibility into workforce-centric attributes like skills, experience, cost rate, availability, location, certifications, etc., across functional units. Therefore, it enables managers to identify, share, and track skilled resources across multiple projects while avoiding scheduling conflicts.
Ensures Even Workload Distribution Across Teams
Managers can leverage a resource calendar to ensure tasks are assigned to employees based on their capacity, availability, expertise, etc. This ensures balanced workload distribution and optimal workforce utilization. Consequently, this leads to higher employee engagement, increased productivity, and high ROI.
Read More: What is Workload Distribution, and Effective Strategies to Improve it?
Given the benefits of a resource calendar, here’s a step-by-step guide to effectively create it.
How to Create a Resource Calendar
The following are key steps to build a resource calendar:
Choose a Smart Resource Calendar Tool
Many organizations still use Excel-based planners due to their familiarity, low cost, and ease of access. However, these tools lack the mechanisms to forecast, track, and update workforce-related information in real-time.
By investing in a smart resource calendar, managers can gain complete visibility into the team’s current and future schedules. This enables firms to make informed resource allocation decisions and maintain project timelines within budget.
Read More: The Art of Resource Planning Across Multiple Projects
Collect and Organize Resource Data
Managers should begin by compiling accurate resource information, including employee names, roles, skills, competency levels, location, etc. Additionally, it’s essential to account for non-human resources critical to project execution.
This includes necessary tools, machinery, equipment, facilities, etc. Proper documentation of these resources helps mitigate resource-centric bottlenecks and ensure seamless allocation.
Define Availability and Work Schedules
The next step is to define each employee’s availability based on their work type. Full-time employees typically follow a fixed five-day workweek, while part-time staff may work three or four days a week, depending on their arrangement.
Moreover, managers must also account for company-mandated holidays, planned leaves, sick days, sabbaticals, etc. This helps firms allocate tasks effectively and maintain project continuity.
Assign Tasks Based on Skills and Capacity
Organizations must continuously track workforce capacity and skills in real-time to ensure employees have the necessary competencies and bandwidth for current or upcoming tasks.
In case of variances, managers can take proactive resourcing decisions to address them ahead of time. This prevents last-minute scrambling for suitable personnel, optimizes resource allocation, and reduces unnecessary costs.
Read More: What is a Utilization Report and 5 Steps to Build an Effective One
Optimize Workload with Data-Driven Insights
Tracking employee workload throughout the project lifecycle is crucial for maintaining efficiency. By leveraging data-driven utilization reports, managers can gain valuable insights into team performance and workload distribution.
This enables managers to take proactive measures to prevent over- or under-utilization. They can also implement suitable optimization techniques to balance workloads, improve resource health index, and ensure seamless project execution.
SAVIOM’s Resource Utilization Report gives managers real-time insights into each employee’s workload, ensuring optimal utilization.
Review and Update the Calendar Regularly
Managers must routinely review and update the resource calendar to maintain accurate employee availability, task assignments, and time-off details. Keeping it up to date prevents double bookings, schedule/budget overruns, etc.
A dynamic calendar allows firms to adapt to unforeseen changes, optimize workforce allocation, and enhance productivity. This ensures project continuity, improves operational efficiency, and guarantees quality deliverables.
Next, we shall see how advanced resource management software can help create a resource calendar.
How Can a Modern Resource Management Tool Help?
A next-gen resource management tool can efficiently streamline workforce planning and scheduling, helping managers deploy the right people to the right tasks and ensuring successful project delivery. Here’s how:
- The tool offers enterprise-wide visibility into the resource pool, assisting managers in assigning the best-fit personnel based on their skills, qualifications, availability, experience, etc., to projects.
- The tool’s forecasting and capacity planning feature enables managers to conduct demand gap analysis to identify and mitigate resource shortages/surpluses ahead of time.
- The embedded competency matrix helps capture and maintain detailed workforce information like resource skills, certifications, and expertise., to ensure competent team members are assigned to projects.
- The software’s real-time BI reports and dashboards offer valuable insights into key performance metrics like resource utilization, capacity vs demand, and more, enabling managers to make informed decisions.
Conclusion
A well-structured resource calendar is key to optimizing workforce allocation, boosting productivity, and ensuring successful project outcomes. By adhering to the abovementioned steps, managers can develop a robust calendar that guarantees the right resources are available at the right time. This enables seamless project workflow, enhances operational efficiency, and maximizes ROI.
The Glossary
Read More: Glossary of Resource Workforce Planning, Scheduling and Management
